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Monday, May 23, 2016

Access to low-cost quality medicines plays a critical role in public health systems. In the last decade, the public health challenges facing developing countries have expanded beyond infectious diseases to non-communicable diseases (“NCDs”) in large part due to changing lifestyles and environmental risks. The World Health Organisation estimates that 80 per cent of all deaths from NCDs occur in low- and middle-income countries like India.

Never mind correlation is no cause, and anyway there is no correlation between population concentration and poverty, using BigPharma to control population is the point, as when the USA Centers for Disease Control ran the Tuskegee Experiments to not treat Americans of African ancestry for syphilis, to see what would happen. As if 5000 years of experience needed to be checked. How come they never included white folk upon which to experiment? Well, not to worry, no one went to prison for the crime, and now ongoing secret criminal experiments continue and include white people as victims too.

Generic drugs cost a fraction of the monopoly prices charged in countries like the United States, and the presence of multiple generic competitors in India has reduced the price of cancer and HIV treatment by as much as 90 to 1,000 per cent. For instance, first-line HIV treatment that costs over Rs.16 lakh annually to treat just one patient in the U.S. costs the Indian AIDS programme approximately Rs.7,000.

Right. And India needs to get busy making their own real drugs that work for patients worldwide. In the meantime, the thugs in government who work for BigPharm are trying to blackmail India into participating in the continuation of the Tuskegee Experiments.

India must clearly reject the intellectual property laws which the United States is trying to force on us. These have led to an unprecedented health crisis in the U.S. itself, with spiralling prices of medicines under lengthy and multiple IP monopolies, with American insurance companies struggling to manage the cost of reimbursing expensive new medicines, all of which threaten people’s access to treatment. Current U.S. intellectual property laws have done nothing but enable pharmaceutical companies to charge exorbitant prices for medicines, such as over $1,00,000 annually for new cancer medicines and $1,000 a pill for new hepatitis C treatments. This has made health care simply out of reach for the vast majority of Americans and the issue of affordable health care has dominated the primaries in the ongoing American presidential elections. This failed model, which has allowed companies to profit from human misery and is even rejected in its own country, is not worthy of our consideration.